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Reprinted from the 

EDUCATIONAL REVIEW 

New York, January, 1905 



THE COLLEGE 



Paper read before the International Congress of Arts and Science, Department 

23 {The College), Section 3, at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition 

at St. Louis, Mo., September 19-24, 1904 



BY 
M. CAREY THOMAS 



Gift 

Author 
(pe 









IV 
THE COLLEGE x 

No one of the other subjects selected for discussion in the 
seven divisions, twenty-four departments, and one hundred 
and twenty-seven sections of the Congress of Arts and Science 
seems to me so vitally connected with the future well-being 
of the American people as the American College which we are 
to discuss to-day. 

The College does indeed need eloquent defenders, such as 
the speaker who has preceded me, for the executioner's ax is 
at its throat. The school, however badly planned taught and 
administered, has an assured existence ; the university, however 
amorphous and inchoate, is to be fostered and extended ; but 
the College, the center of all our culture for the past century, 
is sore beset, and has more to fear from the Judas-like kisses of 
its friends in high places than from the mob of the illiterate 
and sordid, who always cry " loose us Barabbas " when the 
powers of evil are in the ascendant and any mighty influence for 
good is brought to the judgment seat. Let us this afternoon 
mount the tribunal and try the case. As the accused is on 
trial for his life, plain speaking will be in order. 

We are told first of all that the prisoner cannot be identified, 
that his personality is all abroad, that his very aeg is not cer- 
tain, and that even his name is not his own, but that he is often 
caught masquerading under the name of " university " or 
" high school." 

It is true that his adversaries have striven mightily to de- 
stroy the character and moral stamina of the college course 
thru the foolish dissipations of unrestricted electives, but, 
thanks be to the powers that make for righteousness, they have 
striven in vain. Everything now indicates a return to the old 

1 Paper read before the International Congress of Arts and Science, Department 
23 (The College), Section 3, at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. Louis, 
Mo., September 19-24, 1904. 



2 Educational Review [January 

educational standards of strenuous intellectual discipline — and 
to better than the old standards. It cannot be denied that 
other enemies of the College, working in darkness, have in- 
sidiously set out to hew off one year of his age, the very 
flower of his maturity, in order to enrich the professional 
school ; and that still other enemies, working openly in the eye 
of day, have deprived him outright of the last and supreme 
year of his growth ; and that even now a howling pack of high 
schools is at his heels, snatching at the first year of his bud- 
ding strength. It is too true that within the past decade two 
mighty university foes have come up against him — one from 
the greatest city of the East, and one from the greatest city of 
the West — menacing his life itself with whirling sWords, to 
cut him asunder at the belt-line, leaving him a two years' 
torso, casting the last two years, the heart and brains of him, 
in part to the professional school, but in greater part to outer 
darkness and destruction ; and yet, altho all this is true, and 
altho the combat is still raging, it is not, I think, too soon to 
assert that the prisoner at the bar will continue to be in the 
future, as he has been in the past, four years of age, four 
whole, happy, fruitful college years — no more, no less. 

Finally, as to the name of the accused. His name is " the 
College," the name that has come to be applied by universal 
consent to a four years' course of liberal, non-professional 
study, superimposed on the course of the high school, private 
school, or academy, pursued by young men (and since 1870, 
by young women) 'from eighteen or nineteen to twenty-two 
or twenty-three years of age, who have, as a rule, left their 
homes and come to reside in the college itself, or in the town or 
city in which it is situated. The name and the thing are -purely 
Anglo-Saxon, brought over by our forefathers from the 
mother country. The college as an institution is unknown 
outside the United States and Great Britain and her colonies. 
The name is ingrained in our thought and history and should 
be retained so long as the thing itself remains. It is a real ob- 
stacle to clear thinking to call a " college course " a " university 
course," as is constantly done in the West. There is absolutely 
no difference in the methods of instruction of a properly organ- 



1905] The college 3 

ized college, whether it be detached like Amherst or Bowdoin, 
or part of a group of professional and technical schools, like 
Michigan or Chicago. Even eminent university presidents 
have been betrayed by this loose terminology into assuming 
that the instruction in the detached college and in the college 
of a university should differ essentially, forgetting that the 
mind of the boy or girl does not change with the change of 
name, and that students of the immaturity of the American 
student between eighteen and twenty-two years of age cannot 
with advantage to themselves pursue college subjects by uni- 
versity methods. 2 

It seems to me vain to hope to displace the term " univer- 
sity," which is now so firmly established thruout the entire 
West, and recently also in the East as well. And, after all, is 
there any good reason why we should use the word in its 
foreign German or French, and not in our own English sense ? 
Oxford and Cambridge have been composed of numerous 
undergraduate colleges from the beginning of their history. 
The Scotch and Irish universities are so organized. The new 
universities of Manchester and Birmingham and Liverpool 
correspond precisely to our State universities, with college de- 
partments and undergraduate technical and professional 
schools. " University " in English and American usage 
means, and has always meant, a group o'f schools, all under- 
graduate, of which the undergraduate college usually is, and 
always should be, the most important. However low in grade 
is the instruction offered, a variety of technical and professional 
courses seems to constitute the claim to the name " university " 
in Anglo-Saxon countries. But if it is vain to displace the 
term " university," let us see to it that the word " college " is 
used correctly, and let us sharply distinguish by the preface of 
the word " graduate " the true graduate schools of medicine, 
law, and theology, and also the true graduate philosophical 
school from the ordinary low-grade non-graduate professional 
schools of the majority of American universities. 3 Let us 

2 See, e. g.. President's Report, University of Chicago, 1898-99, reprinted in the 
Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago, Series I, p. xciv, xcv. 

3 The only graduate professional schools in the United States are the Medical 
School of the Johns Hopkins University, the Medical, Law, and Theological 
Schools of Harvard, and the Law School of Columbia. 



4 Educational Review [January 

accustom ourselves to speak of the graduates of Harvard Col- 
lege, Michigan College, Chicago College, or of graduates of 
the College of Harvard, Michigan, or Chicago, just as we 
speak of graduates of the Medical School or Law School of 
Harvard, Michigan, and Chicago. The term university 
graduate is too broad, and may mean anything from a 
doctor of philosophy to a farmer, or horse doctor, without 
even a high-school education. It should not be used for col- 
lege graduates. Unless this rule is followed by college and 
university authorities, all our detached colleges will inevitably 
be compelled in self-defense to call themselves universities — a 
real pedagogical misfortune, and a break with tradition and 
culture. 

But let us proceed to trial. Why should the prisoner lose 
his head, or his feet, or be sawn asunder in the middle? Is 
it because, as indicated above, our American university pro- 
fessional schools are not university schools in the French or 
German sense? Already in 1884 the far-seeing President of 
Harvard University had begun to urge the shortening of the 
college course and the raising of requirements for admission 
to professional schools, in 1893 the Johns Hopkins Univer- 
sity opened its school of medicine, the first graduate, or true 
university professional school, in the German sense, in the 
United States. Also in 1893 Professor Von Hoist in his 
oration before the first Convocation of the University of 
Chicago sounded a clarion note of awakening to American 
universities, and in 1900 Professor Perry's lucid and ad- 
mirable monograph on American universities drove home con- 
viction of sin. Since 1893 university presidents, like all other 
American scholars, have realized that our American universties 
are not universities in the German sense of an assemblage of 
graduate professional schools, and it is in order to reform this 
condition of affairs that many of them have joined President 
Eliot in endeavoring to shorten the American college 
course. Obviously one way to make our professional schools 
graduate schools (in name, if not in fact) is to lower the 
standard of the degree we require for admission. This is the 
method adopted by Harvard, which since 1902 has required 



1905] The college 5 

the B. A. degree for admission to its schools of law, medicine, 
and theology, but has reduced the time requirement for its 
bachelor's degree from four to three years. Another and 
more rapid method of producing graduate professional students 
has been in operation at Chicago University since 1898. The 
college course has there been cut in half, and a certificate of 
what we may call " immaturity," but what Chicago calls a 
diploma of " University [sic] Associate," has been given at 
the end of the Sophomore year, and it is hoped to require this 
certificate for admission to the professional schools of the uni- 
versity. 4 The President of Columbia is now urging still more 
radical action, which, if generally adopted, will, in my opinion, 
sound the death knell of the college. He proposes two B. A. 
degrees, one to be conferred at the end of the Sophomore year 
for those who take up professional study, and one to be con- 
ferred at the end of the present Senior year for such other 
students as may chance to linger to receive it. 5 Graduate pro- 
fessional schools obtained by such a sacrifice of culture and 
efficiency will, it seems to many of us, be graduate schools only 
thru the quibble of a misused name. 

Another and even more insidious plan for securing graduate 
students in professional schools is now in operation in many 
universities. The last year of college work is permitted to be 
taken in the law or medical school, and is counted double, — 
once as the senior year of the B. A. course, and twice as the 
first year of the professional course. The student himself also 
counts double, once as an undergraduate Senior, and twice as a 

* See the Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago, Series I, p. 85, 
86, xcii, xciii, xcv, xcvi. 

6 This statement is obviously based on a complete misunderstanding of the 
facts. — Editor. 

[I greatly regret that I should have overlooked President Butler's suggestion (see 
President's Report, Columbia University, 1902, p. 44) that these two B. A. courses 
should be differently lettered, although I confess that to my mind the substitution 
of an M for a B in the degree conferred at the end of the present four undergradu- 
ate years will do little, or nothing, to avert the disastrous consequences to be feared. 
The sentence in question should have read as follows: He proposes in reality two 
undergraduate courses, one to be known as the B. A. course, ending with the 
present sophomore year for those who take up professional study, and one to be 
known as the M. A. course, ending with the present senior year for such other 
students as may chance to linger on to complete it. — Author.] 



6 Educational Review [January- 

graduate member (which he is not) of the graduate profes- 
sional school. Nothing more disastrous to honest standards of 
academic work can be conceived of. Yet Harvard, Yale, 
Columbia, Cornell, Pennsylvania, and many other Eastern and 
Western universities are now educating ministers, doctors^ 
and lawyers under this shifty and canny arrangement. 

But why, then, apart from the desire of some universities 
to inflate their profesional schools, should the college course 
be shortened and its content lessened? For let us squarely 
face the fact that this is the issue involved. It is idle to assert, 
as has been asserted repeatedly in official Harvard publications 
(see President's Report for 1901-02, p. 27, and many earlier 
reports), that the content and quality will not be lessened by a 
shortened college course, or, in other words, that four years' 
work can be doae in three years' time. All practical teachers 
know that the professor must adapt his pace to the average of 
his class, and that if the majority is doing four years' work in 
three years' time, the majority will see to it that three years' 
work, and not four years', is done. Harvard itself is a case in 
point. In 1880 twenty-one courses were required for the 
Harvard B. A. degree; in 1904 only seventeen and one-half 
courses are required, of which one and one-half may be 
passed off at entrance, or in reality only sixteen courses are 
required in the present three years' Harvard B. A. course 
as against twenty-one courses required for the former 
four years' Harvard B. A. course. A recent report of 
a " Committee on Improving Instruction in Harvard Col- 
lege," appointed in May, 1902, whose membership of nine 
included some of the best-known senior professors of the 
Harvard Faculty (see Harvard graduates' magazine, June, 
1904, p. 611-620), states that "the average amount of 
study in Harvard College is discreditably small," that " the 
average amount of work done by undergraduates (more than 
one-half of whom have obtained the grade of A or B) in con- 
nection with a three hours' course is less than three and one- 
half hours a week outside of the lecture room," and " that the 
difficulty of raising the standard is seriously increased by stu- 
dents' taking six courses each " (in other words, by students' 



1905] The college 7 

taking the college course in three years). If tinder the unre- 
stricted elective system the college course has lost tone and be- 
come too easy by one-fourth for the ordinary student, the 
remedy would seem to be in stiffening up the already emascu- 
lated course, not in lopping off a year of it. 6 

Why should the college course be shortened ? Because in 
France and Germany a boy completes his course in the lycee 
or gymnasium at twenty years of age, and enters upon his pro- 
fessional course at the university without anything that re- 
motely resembles our college course. But is this a reason? 
■How do we know that the German or French boy is better off 
without a college course? After sitting side by side with -the 
German gymnasium graduate in Leipzig for three years and 
hearing him blunder thru his pro-seminar recitations, and 
after listening in the Paris International Congress of 1900 to 
prolonged discussions about the limitations of the lycee gradu- 
ate and the misfortune of his choosing a career with only the 
school outlook of the lycee course — discussions in which he 
was incessantly compared by Frenchmen themselves to the 
English and American college graduate greatly to his dis- 
advantage — I have come to the conclusion that he is much 
worse off. If it were possible, and if possible desirable, to 
enforce over the whole United States two or three cast-iron 
high-school courses, so difficult and rigid that private schools 
would be practically annihilated thru the impossibility of reach- 
ing their standard, and to require the completion of one of 
these courses not only for admission to all the colleges, but 
also to all the law, medical, and theological schools in the 
United States, and above all to every lucrative and distin- 

6 President Eliot (President's Report for 1892-03, p. 24) says: " Nobody doubts 
that at present the degree of Bachelor of Arts can be obtained in Harvard College, 
or in any other \sic\ American, English, or Scotch college or university by any 
young man of moderate parts with a small expenditure of force during not more 
than one-half of each of the years of nominal residence." 

Professor W. E. Byerly {Harvard graduates' magazine, December, 1902, p. 186) 
says: " It is commonly, and I believe correctly, asserted, that a student of fair 
ability, entering college from a good preparatory school, choosing his courses with 
discretion, using borrowed or purchased lecture notes, and attending one or two 
coaching ' seminars ' for a couple of evenings before the mid-year and final exam- 
inations, can win our A. B. degree without spending more than half an hour a day 
in serious study outside of the lecture and examination rooms." 



8 Educational Review [January 

guished position, whether civil or military, in the gift of the 
general or State governments, including, of course, the position 
of teacher in, these same high schools and in the primary schools 
as well, and if, furthermore, completion of. six out of the nine 
years in these high schools were made the condition of escap- 
ing one year's hated service as a common soldier in the army, 
and the escaping of such service, futhermore, were made, as 
in Germany, a primary social necessity for gentlemen — 
if all this were possible, perhaps our American boys too would 
be able to learn as much by twenty years of age as German or 
French boys ; and perhaps such tremendous financial and social 
bribes would buy the silence and co-operation of American 
parents in the German or French deliberate and unwavering 
sacrifice of youthful joy and sports before the Moloch of 
future success. Even if all these impossible conditions were 
to come into existence in the United States, it is at least an 
open question whether we should not have lost in education 
far more than we should have gained. In all comparisons 
between German and American higher education it ought never 
to be forgotten that the German and French universities do 
not profess to teach systematically and to examine the ordinary 
college student who is preparing himself for the life of affairs. 
They deal primarily with professional students, whereas the 
reverse is coming to be true in the United States. But it is 
impossible to argue from one country to another when condi- 
tions are so radically different. 

Our opponents ask us what there is sacred about the num- 
ber four, and remind us that some few early American colleges 
had a three years' course, as have Oxford and Cambridge 
to-day. But our conditions are as different from colonial 
America, and from Oxford and Cambridge, as from France and 
Germany. In England, as in Germany, the would-be honor 
student who goes up to Oxford and Cambridge from the great 
English public schools, which are in themselves residential col- 
leges in our sense, giving the social and educational stamp of 
the American college and teaching far more of classics and 
mathematics than any American high school or academy, has 
everything to gain or lose in his after-life, both financially 



1905] The college 9 

and socially, from his success or failure in the most rigid exam- 
inations the world has ever known. Perhaps if in our American 
colleges we could select bv the most strenuous competition the 
best tutors and employ them at high salaries to teach our col- 
lege students in small groups of two, three, and four students, 
and all our ablest students by themselves, and if we too could 
make so much depend upon the grade obtained by these stu- 
dents at the end of a three years' course of study in an exami- 
nation so rigorous and searching as to be without parallel in 
our educational system, we might be able to obtain as good re- 
sults in three, as in four years. But in Oxford and Cambridge, 
as in Germany, it is only the " honor," not the " pass," men 
who attain this education. The education of the average man 
is neglected. 

There is of course nothing sacred about a four years' course 
as such, except in so far as the experience of seventy years has 
proved it to be adapted to the needs of successive generations 
of college students. The college department of the Johns 
Hopkins University is often referred to as an example of 
a three years' college course; but in reality it is composed of 
the usual four college classes, the first-year students being 
known as " candidates for matriculation," and a real Fresh- 
man, or preparatory, year being maintained under the name 
of a " class for non-matriculants." The standard of ad- 
mission to the three years' college course has been set so high 
that since the opening of the college in 1876 this class of 
non-matriculates, or Freshmen, has formed 21.5 per cent, of 
the" whole undergraduate body of students, and in the year 
1903-04 these non-matriculates numbered 38, and the matricu- 
lates 104; in other words, the non-matriculates were not less 
than the number of Freshmen one would naturally expect iu 
an undergraduate college numbering 142 students. Moreover, 
the undergraduate department of the Johns Hopkins Univer- 
sity is so small and unimportant, as compared to its graduate 
school, that, even if the course of study were not practically a 
four years' course, it could not be used to prove that a three 
years' college course will satisfy the needs of the community, 
especially as an immensely greater proportion of the gradu- 



*o Educational Review [January 

ates of the College of the Johns Hopkins University (over 
one-fourth) enter the graduate school than is the case else- 
where. 

For the past nineteen years I have acted as adviser to the 
students who have studied at Bryn Mawr College, and I have 
been consulted by them in their Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, 
and Senior years. If my experience proves anything at all, 
it proves that the first two years, or the first three years, of a 
college course do not really count as equal in value to one-half, 
or three-fourths, of four years, because the Junior and 
Senior years are usually years of such intellectual awakening, 
and furthermore that the Senior year has a value far greater 
than that of the other years. It is the culmination of the whole 
college course, and a student who leaves college at the end of 
three years suffers, it seems to me, incalculable loss. As the 
entrance requirements of Bryn Mawr are at least as high as 
those of any college in the United States, and its college 
course, organized under the group system, really strenuous and 
difficult, and as girls are supposed to be more mature than 
boys of like age, and admittedly at present study more faith- 
fully, my observations could not, I think, have been made 
under more favorable conditions for the shortened college 
course. 

Why, then, should this priceless Senior year be omitted, or 
taken in the law or medical school ? Is it because those high 
in authority have told us that boys are entering college from 
one to two years older than in the past, and that therefore this 
lost year must be recovered? But four careful statistical 
studies of age entering college have proved beyond a shadow 
of doubt, that such statements are not supported by fact, and 
that for the great majority of colleges the median and average 
age of admission has not varied three months in the past fifty 
years, the median age showing a net reduction of two months 
in fifty years for all colleges, and the average age having fallen 
one and one-half months in the past forty years. 7 

7 President E. Benjamin Andrews," Time and age in relation to the college cur- 
riculum," Educational Review, February, 1891, p. 133-146; S C. Bartlett, 
" Shortening thecol'ege course." Education, June. iSqi, p. 585-590; Professor W. 
Scott Thomas, " Changes in the age of graduation," Popular science monthly \ 



I9 o5j The college i;| 

: We are told by these same special pleaders that in maturity 
and acquirement the college student of to-day is two years 
above the college student of thirty years ago. This statement 
does not admit of the same disproof, but as the age of the col- 
lege student of to-day remains the same as thirty years ago, 
we may be permitted to doubt it. Maturity and acquirement 
are more a matter of age than we realize. Were it not for 
this it would be easy for American fitting schools to prepare 
boys and girls for the highest American college entrance re- 
quirements at seventeen, or even at sixteen, but the majority 
of colleges do not wish such young students. Immaturity of 
mind would make them undesirable. 

We have been told repeatedly in the course of this discussion 
that college attendance in the United States was falling off, 
and that, unless our colleges were to be deserted by students, 
we must shorten the course in order to attract the sons of 
practical men. Again statistical investigation has proved this 
statement also mistaken. On the contrary, practical men are 
sending their sons and daughters to college in such overwhelm- 
ing numbers that all our best colleges are growing in students 
out of all proportion to the population. 8 

June, 1903, p. 159-171 (the arguments of above three papers are summarized by 
Professor Elmer C. Brown in Addresses and Proceedings of the National Educa- 
tional Association, 1903, p. 492-493); Professor Henry P. Wright (President's 
Report, Yale University, 1901-02, p. 43~44, a n d 47~5o) has shown that, in spite of 
the very great gradual increase in the amount required for admission, the average 
age of Yale classes at graduation has increased less than four months in the forty 
years from 1863 to 1902; and only nine months in the past eighty years. In study- 
ing the age of admission daring the past forty or fifty years, care should be taken 
to consider only the statistics of those colleges which have maintained a genuine 
college course during this time, whose standards have developed gradually, and not 
colleges situated in large cities that have developed from comparatively low-grade 
institutions into really high-grade colleges within the past few years. For example, 
the age of graduation at New York University has risen thirteen months in the past 
fifty years (see Popular science monthly, June, 1903, p. 160). Since i860 the age 
of graduation at Columbia, and the work done, have risen two whole years accord- 
ing to careful estimates, and according to actual statistics the age of admission has 
risen one year between 1880 and 1902 (see President's Report, Columbia Univer- 
sity, 1902, p. 39). It is only recently that colleges situated in cities have been able 
to maintain standards of admission and college work such as the best-known New 
England colleges, Harvard, Yale, Amherst, etc., have maintained for the past five 
decades. 

8 Professor Arthur N. Comey, " The growlhof New England colleges," Educa- 
tional Review, March, 1891; and " Growth of the colleges of the United States," 



12 Educational Review [January 

Recently a novel and equally fallacious argument has been 
brought forward. We are told that the college course must 
be shortened to three years because an examination of the mar- 
riage statistics of a certain college for men shows that the 
children of married graduates are not numerous enough (in 
the classes graduating from 1870 to 1879, for example, not 
over 1.95 children per Harvard father) to enable college men 
to reproduce themselves, and that the children are so few be- 
cause the four years' college course has unduly delayed the 
beginning of professional and business life, and has thereby 
prevented such men from marrying until so late in life that 
their power of reproduction is limited — presumably by old 
age. It is almost needless to point out that before drawing 
any such far-reaching conclusion in regard to the shortening 
of the college course it would be necessary to know many 
other factors in this particular case, such as the average age 
of marriage of these college graduates, the age and other 
qualifications of the women they marry, and, above all, 
whether there is the slightest ground for supposing that the 
postponement of marriage one year by a man presumably in 
his prime could materially affect the number of children he is 
able to beget, if he and his wife wish for the largest attainable 
family. But a reference to well-known statistics will dispose 
of the whole argument. In the case of the alleged increase of 
the age of graduation, and the assumed decrease of college 
students the facts themselves were incorrect, here the conclu- 
sions are wholly unjustified. The failure of Harvard students 
to reproduce themselves is not a peculiarity of Harvard grad- 
uates as such, but seems to be a characteristic of our American 
stock, and, above all, of our native Massachusetts stock, t.> 
which two-thirds of Harvard graduates belong. It seems to 
be as true of native American factory operatives, farmers, and 

Educational Review, February, 1892; Mr. Talcott Williams, "The future of 
the college," Proceedings of the Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools in 
the Middle Slates and Maryland, 1894, and also " College entrance examinations," 
Proceedings of the same Association, 1896, an admirable statistical paper showing 
not only that college students have greatly increased, but that at Amheist during 
the last fifty years the percentage of those students graduating in each entering class 
has risen from 70 per cent, to 72 per cent., and that at Yale during the past thirty 
years the percentage has risen from 63 per cent, to 72 per cent. 



1905] The college 13 

artisans as of Harvard graduates, and has, therefore, nothing 
whatever to do with the length of a college course, or, indeed, 
with a college education at all. 9 

Should, then, our college course be shortened because our 
professional courses are long? There were in the year 1902, 
according to the Report of the U. S. Commissioner of Edu- 
cation, 88,879 students pursuing college courses in the United 
States, and 49,076 students studying law, medicine, and 
theology, and of these only 7,189 had received the bachelor's 
degree. Only two medical schools, the Johns Hopkins, and 
Harvard, and only two law schools, Harvard, and Columbia, 
now require a bachelor's degree for admission. It was esti- 
mated by a special committee of the Board of Overseers of 
Harvard University that in 1890 only 8 per cent, of the 

9 See President Eliot, President's Report, Harvard University, 1901-02, p. 31- 
32. For additional statistics of the marriage rate and size of families of college 
graduates of Yale College see Mr. Clarence Deming, Yale alumni weekly, March 
4, 1903; Professor Thorndike, " Decrease in size of American families," Popular 
science monthly, May, 1903, gives similar statistics for New York Univtrsity, 
Middlebury, and Wesleyan; Dr. George J. Engelmann, " Education not the cause 
of race decline," Popular science monthly, June, 1903, prints tables for Harvard, 
Yale, Princeton, Bowdoin, and Brown, and compares them (favorably for college 
graduates) with similar statistics tor other classes of the population; President G. 
Stanley Hall and Dr. Theodate L. Smith," Marriage and fecundity of college men 
and women," Ped. Sent., vol. x, September, 1903, p. 275-314; President Stanley 
Hall, Adolescence (Appleton & Co., 1904), vol. ii, p. 590-606, discusses the ques- 
tion of the marriages and children of college men and women, but draws conclusions 
apparently unjustified by existing data in the case of men college graduates, and 
certainly wholly unwarranted in the case of women college graduates. These 
statistics may be compared with similar statistics for Massachusetts and the rest of 
the United States: Dr. Nathan Allen, " The New England family," A T ew England 
magazine, 1882; F. S. Crum, "The birth-rate in Massachusetts" (1850-90), 
Quar. jour, of economics, April, 1857; S. W. Abbott, "Vital statistics of Massa- 
chusetts from 1856-95"; Dr. Ellis, "Deterioration of Puritan stock and its 
causes," privately published by author, New York, 1S94; Kuczynski, " The fecund- 
ity of the native and foreign-born population in Massachusetts" (period from 1835— 
1897), the Quar. jour, of economics, November, 1901, and February, 1902; Dr. 
Fred A. Bushee, American Economic Association Publications, May, 1903; Dr. 
John S. Billings, " The diminishing birth-rate in the United States," The forum, 
June, 1903; Dr. Fred A. Bushee," The declining birth-rate and its cause," Popular 
science monthly, August, 1903 (" these statistics put the whole native population of 
Massachusetts in the same position as college graduates, and the question accord- 
ingly seems to be one of the upper class, or of the older part of the population, and 
not simply a question of the educated classes," see p. 357); Joseph Korosi, " An 
estimate of the degree of legitimate vitality, drawn from municipal statistics, Buda- 
pest," with comments by Francis Galton, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 
vol. 55, December, 1894. 



14 Educational Review [January- 

medical students, 18 per cent, of the law students, and 
23 per cent, of the theological students of the United States 
had received the bachelor's degree (see Report, p. 12). In 
the law and medical schools of Yale, Columbia, Pennsylvania, 
and Cornell, which, together with the purely graduate schools 
of the Johns Hopkins, and Harvard, may be assumed to be 
the best equipped afcid most advanced professional schools of 
the East, the bachelors of arts and science did not average 
31 per cent, of the whole body of professional students in 
1902 (see President's Report, Harvard University, 1 go 1-02, 
p. 29). Only 11 per cent, of college graduates of twenty- 
seven of the most advanced colleges in the United States study 
theology (see Professor Francis G. Peabody, " The propor- 
tion of college-trained preachers," The forum, September, 
1894, p. 30-41). Clearly, then, the answer is emphatically 
no. The college course must not be impoverished in the in- 
terests of a few thousand holders of the bachelor's degree pur- 
suing professional study, and forming scarcely 7 per cent, of 
the total number of college students, and not even one-third 
of the professional students, in the most advanced profes- 
sional schools in the East. Moreover, even as it is, these 
college graduates in professional schools are not a year older 
than the non-college graduates in these same professional 
schools, according to the age tables of the Harvard Law 
School covering twenty years (see President's Report, Har- 
vard University, 1893-1904, p. 127). Yet most discussions 
on the length of the college course begin gravely with the 
statement : " Since it is admitted by common consent that 
the practice of the professions begins too late in life, there- 
fore the college course must be shortened." But who has 
admitted it? Surely a study of the whole subject affords us 
no reason for admitting it. Quite the reverse. Before we 
repeat over like parrots such phrases as this, let us investigate 
the actual conditions. For example, let us first find out what 
the non-college graduates who form two-thirds of professional 
law students have done with the three years during which the 
other one-third are in college, and why they are only a few 
months younger than college graduates in law schools. How 



*9°5 



The college 15 



do we know that, if we shorten the college course in the in- 
terest of this college third, they will spend the year thus saved 
in the professional schools? May not they also dissipate it 
like the two-thirds who do not go to college ? 

And, surely, the college course should not be shortened be- 
cause of our graduate schools of philosophy. So few students 
are graduated from these schools that they are a negligible 
quantity. In the past five years, from 1898- 1902, only 1,566 
men and women have received the degree of Ph. D. from the 
thirty-four graduate schools of the United States, and most of 
these graduates have been bribed by scholarships and fellow- 
ships to take this degree. During these five years over 54,900 
bachelor's degrees have been conferred. 10 Also, the age 
tables of the Harvard Ph. Ds. kept during the past seven years, 
(see President's Report, Harvard University, 1902-03, p. 139) 
prove that the greater number of Harvard Ph. D. graduates 
(and presumably other Ph. Ds.) are twenty-eight years of 
age and over, and do not, therefore, take up graduate study 
immediately on graduation, and are not directly affected by 
the length of the college course. 

Shall we shorten the college course because the College has 
proved itself inefficient in the past? No, a thousand times, 
no! It has been the glory of our past, the source of stability 
and sanity, the radiant center of all our gallant action and 
liberal thought. And since its integrity has been so seriously 
threatened we have become aware by numerous statistical in- 
vestigations that the College has also been in the past the 
nursing mother of statesmen, and men of affairs, and the lavish 
bestower of fame and of all those social distinctions that we 
long to receive at the hands of our fellow-men. It has been 
proved that altho in the past only 1 per cent, (the ratio is now 
over 3 per cent.) of American men have received a college 
education, in the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Congresses the 
House of Representatives contained nearly 36 per cent, and 
the Senate over 36.3 per cent, of college-bred men, or thirty- 

10 See Reports of the U. S. Commi.-sioner of Education; Science, August 19, 
1904, states that in the past seven years, from 1898-1904, only 1713 Ph. Ds. have 
been conferred. 



1 6 Educational Review [January 

two times as many as might have been expected ; that in the 
fifty-seven years, from 1841-98, 55 per cent, of the Speakers, 
55 per cent, of all the elected Presidents of the United States, 
and 54 per cent, of all the Vice-Presidents have been college 
graduates, and that 68 per cent, of members of the Supreme 
Court, and 85 per cent, of the Chief Justices of the United 
States have been college-bred men. 11 One out of 40 college 
graduates as against 1 out of 10,000 non-college graduates 
are mentioned in Appleton's Encyclopedia of American biog- 
raphy. 12 In the 1900 edition of Who's who in America, 
1 in every 106 of the living graduates of the colleges men- 
tioned in Who's who has attained mention as against 1 in 
600 of non-college graduates, or, in other words, a college 
graduate's chance of this kind of Who's who eminence is more 
than 5.6 times that of the non-college-bred man. If we 
assume that 27 per cent, of lawyers are college graduates, this 
27 per cent, forms 46 per cent, of the eminent Who's who 
lawyers; likewise the 24.7 per cent, of college-bred clergymen 
form 53.3 of the divines mentioned in Who's who, and altho 
only 7.5 per cent, of physicians have received a college degree, 
this 7.5 per cent, furnish 42 per cent, of the physicians who 
have attained Who's who fame. 13 

What does a year more or less matter in beginning pro- 
fessional life, even if all college graduates entered the learned 
professions (which they do not), if college-bred professional 
men have five times the chance of other men to attain wealth 
and eminence? Why should college graduates wish to enter 
business life younger than twenty-two and-a-half years of 

" Professor John Carleton Jones, " Does college education pay?" The forum, 
November, 1898. 

12 President Charles F. Thwing, " The pre-eminence of the college graduate," 
Within college walls, p. 1 56-181. 

13 Professor Edwin Grant Dexter, " A study of twentieth-century success," Popu- 
lar science monthly, July, 1902; see also his " High-grade men: in college and 
out," Popular science monthly, March, 1903 (three times as many $ B. K. gradu- 
ates, or high-grade graduates of twenty-two colleges, are shown to have attained 
mention in Who's who as we should expect; in other words, if an ordinary college 
graduate has five and one-half times the chance of eminence of other men, a college 
graduate of high academic rank has more than fifteen times the chance of eminence). 
The investigation is carried farther by Professor A. Laurence Lowell, " College 
rank and distinction in life," Atlantic monthly, October, 1903. 



1905] The college 17 

age, if their college education will insure them more than five 
times the chances of success they would have had had they 
begun work four years earlier? How can we be sure that 
this chance will be reduced only proportionately by taking away 
one, two, or three years from the present college course ? 

Why should we wish to lay rash hands on an institution so 
wonderfully adapted to our needs as the American college? 
How could we have hoped for more overwhelming proof of 
its efficiency and success, measured not only in the wider 
vision, broader intellectual sympathies, deeper personal happi- 
ness of its graduates, and in all the intangible and ineffable 
things of the spirit, but also, in this truly unexpected and mar- 
velous fashion, in the ringing coin of the market-place? I 
confidently believe, therefore, that the college course of the 
future will be four years. 

Will the college course of the future be wholly elective? 
When President Eliot became President of Harvard College 
in 1869, one-half of the Harvard college course was elective, 
and from that day to this Harvard has led the way under 
his guidance toward unrestricted electives, not only in the 
-college but in the school. Since 1890, however, there are 
many indications that the pendulum is swinging back again 
and common sense reasserting itself. Everyone believes in 
giving the student a wide choice in studies under certain- re- 
strictions ; the question is precisely whether, or not, the student 
shall be guided in some degree by the accumulated experience 
of educated men that have gone before him, as expressed in 
a college curriculum. Our decision as to the wisdom of 
unlimited freedom of electives in both school and college 
depends on whether subjects of study do, or do not, differ 
among themselves, apart from their practical value, as intel- 
lectual disciplines, that is, in training our mental powers. 
Everything in education depends on our answer to this ques- 
tion. I confess that it is to me inconceivable that all sub- 
jects, irrespective of their subject-matter, even if equally well 
taught, should give the same, or equal, intellectual results. 
The mere statement of such a proposition seems to me a 
reductio ad absurdum. If the proposition be true, why do 



1 8 Educational Review [January 

college-bred students excel students that have had severe pro- 
fessional training not only in after-life, but also in the profes- 
sional school itself? In the ten years from 1891 to 1902 the 
37 per cent, of Bachelors of Arts in the Yale Law School car- 
ried off 62 per cent, of the honors and 70 per cent, of the 
prizes, and in the Columbia Law School 94 per cent, of the 
237 men who have attained honor rank in the past ten years 
have been college graduates. 14 

If we believe that there is a real difference in the intellectual 
value of studies, it follows as a consequence of this conclusion 
that certain studies should be taken by everyone if we have 
in view the development of intellectual power by the college 
course, and if we believe in mental discipline, the element of 
continuity also must be insured by the college, and, of course, 
by the school, and only so many electives should be permitted 
as are consistent with training and continuity. There is, I be- 
lieve, a kind of curriculum that combines all these qualifica- 
tions — the " Group System," introduced in 1876 in the three 
years' (now four years') undergraduate course of the Johns 
Hopkins University, amplified into a four years' course and 
named the " Group System " by Bryn Mawr College at its 
opening in 1885, introduced into the college course of the 
University of Indiana in 1888 by President Jordan and Pro- 
fessor von Jagemann, and now adopted in slightly altered 
form in the West by Illinois, Northwestern, Indiana, Missouri, 
Wisconsin, California, and by the two most recent educational 
foundations of the West, Leland Stanford, Jr., and Chicago; 
and in the East by Williams, Dartmouth, Tufts, New York 
University, by Pennsylvania (in the strict Bryn Mawr form), 
and by the four women's colleges of Smith, Wellesley, Mt. 
Holyoke, and the Woman's College of Baltimore. Yale 
adopted the A. B. C. system, or modified group system, in 
1 90 1. Clark College of Clark University opened in 1902 
with the group system in full operation, and the approval 
thereby given to the group system by its president, the Hon. 
Carroll D. Wright, the well-known statistician, is very signifi- 

14 See President's Report, Yale University, 1902-03, p. 131; and President's 
Report, Columbia University, 1902, p. 125. 



1905] The college 19 

cant. Princeton, whose president as a graduate student of the 
Johns Hopkins University and a professor of Bryn Mawr 
College was familiar with the true group system, puts in 
operation this year a modified group system, and the President 
of Columbia in his report for 1902 promises an early con- 
sideration of the group system recommended by three mem- 
bers of the Columbia scientific faculty, two of whom became 
acquainted with the working of the group system as students 
in the Johns Hopkins University and professors in Bryn Mawr 
College. 

It is, then, I think, clear that our four years' college course 
will be, not a free elective course, but that wisely ordered com- 
bination of freedom and authority known as the group system. 
In this respect Harvard does not, I believe, represent the most 
enlightened educational opinion. 

The American College in its fullest perfection will be a 
residential college. We are coming to see that the best re- 
sults of college life are only to be obtained when the college 
student lives an academic life among his companions. The 
English college for men is unique among the institutions of 
the world, and its finished product — the English gentleman, 
equipped beyond his fellows for social and political life — the 
admiration and despair of other nations. In the two cities 
of Oxford and Cambridge, isolated from the outside world 
among green lawns and mediaeval buildings of wonderful 
beauty and charm, this educational process has gone forward 
for hundreds of years, and has given us the men of thought 
and action who have guided the destinies of the English-speak- 
ing races. The ineffable whole of college life seems to be 
made up of semi-seclusion in academic surroundings and of 
intimate and delightful association with other youth of the 
same age and with professors who are devoting themselves to 
scholarship and research. 

There is no fear that in the future the larger colleges will 
absorb the smaller. Colleges will multiply in the future as in 
the past, and the more there are of them the better. It is 
impossible, and highly undesirable if it were possible, to con- 
centrate the youth of our vast country into a few large coh 



20 Educational Review [January- 

leges. Each college creates its own supply of students, and 
two-thirds of the students of all our colleges, large and small, 
come from within a radius of one hundred miles. As each 
student can as a rule attend but one college, each such college 
must be educationally as perfect as possible. If we reduce 
our independent American colleges to glorified high schools, 
as has been suggested, perhaps with questionable disinterested- 
ness, by the presidents of some of the larger universities, we 
thereby cut off the majority of American students from a com- 
plete college education. 

It is clear to me that the college of the future will be co- 
educational. There are in the United States 464 colleges for 
men. In 1870 one-third of these colleges admitted women; 
in 1880, so successful had coeducation proved itself to be, 
one-half had been opened to women, and in 1900 two-thirds 
of all colleges for men had become coeducational. At the 
present time, if we omit Catholic colleges, which in America 
are mainly training schools for priests, 80 per cent., or four- 
fifths, of all colleges for men teach women exactly the same 
subjects by the same professors in the same lecture rooms, and 
allow them to compete for all their degrees, prizes, and fellow- 
ships. There ai'e in the United States also 13 separate col- 
leges for women. In the year 1902 there were nearly 22,507 
women studying in colleges for men, and over 5,549 women 
studying in separate women's colleges, or in all about 28,000 
women college students. Altho there were in the United 
States two million less women than men, women formed about 
one-third of all college students. In addition to the 28,000 
women students in colleges and graduate schools of philos- 
ophy, there were, in 1902, 9,784 women studying engineer- 
ing, mechanics, agriculture, and other technical subjects in uni- 
versities and technical schools; 1,177 studying medicine 218 
studying pharmacy, 162 studying dentistry, 165 studying law, 
and 106 studying theology, or a total of 12,614 women pur- 
suing professional and technical courses. If we combine these 
two classes of students we get a total of 40,676 women study- 
ing in the colleges and professional and technical spools of 
the United States, and the number of college and professional 



1905] The college 21 

women students is steadily increasing. Coeducation is the 
only economical method of educating all those women. It is 
impossible, even if it were not criminally wasteful, to duplicate 
in ever)'' part of the world colleges and universities for women ; 
and not all the wealth of all the world can duplicate the few 
great scientific teachers that are born in any single generation. 
Experience proves that unless schools, and still more univer- 
sities, are conveniently near, even boys go without a higher 
education. Unless in the future all existing colleges and uni- 
versities are to become coeducational, unnumbered generations 
of girls must go without any education beyond that of the 
high school. 

This is not the place to discuss whether or not the college 
curriculum for men and women should be the same. Women 
must decide this for themselves. Men cannot decide it for 
them. In a few years one-third of all the college graduates 
of the United States will be women, and we may safely leave 
the kind of education to be given their daughters in their 
hands. For myself I am convinced that college and school 
education should train the mind and faculties, and not fit 
directly for practical life, and that therefore the question as 
to whether a woman is to make beds, or a man to curry horses, 
after leaving college should not affect their education in col- 
lege, but that all the more on this account should they be 
raised by their education above the petty routine of their after- 
life. 

As the outcome of this discussion of the College this after- 
noon I have hoped that there might be some practical way 
suggested of banding together, for the collection of statistical 
and other information in regard to college education, those 
of us who are interested in maintaining and enriching the col- 
lege as the source of all our culture. It would not be necessary 
to include in such an association all of the 477 colleges of the 
United States. It would be entirely feasible, and eminently 
desirable, to adopt, for example, some such clear and definite 
conditions of admission as I have indicated on pages 11 and 
12 of my monograph on the Education of women. By apply- 
ing four entirely impersonal and general tests I was able to 



22 Educational Review [January 

select the 58 best equipped and most advanced colleges of 
the United States. In such an association there would be 
no secret rites of initiation such as seem somewhat to inter- 
fere with the influence of the Association of American Uni- 
versities ; but each college would understand clearly why it 
was admitted, or excluded, and these very conditions of ad- 
mission would tend to raise the excluded colleges to the admis- 
sion standard. The colleges thus banded together could 
then mutually agree upon a systematic way of keeping, col- 
lecting, and publishing educational statistics. At present 
our college statistics are scarcely kept at all, or, if kept, 
are kept by such different methods that comparison is im- 
possible. For example, no subject has been more hotly de- 
bated than the elective system, and the debate has raged 
during the past thirty years. Yet we have no satisfactory 
records of the subjects elected by students in different colleges 
covering a series of years, or even last year. The Harvard 
Exhibit at this Exposition contains a chart of electives chosen 
during a series of years, but there is no indication of whether 
the one required course in Freshman English inflates the 
bloated block of English electives; nor do we know whether 
other required courses affected earlier blocks. Chicago Uni- 
versity frankly states that required courses greatly influence 
the tables of electives published in its reports, but we are not 
told how great this influence is. Cornell in its tables lumps 
Semitics, Greek, and Latin. Some other colleges put in one 
elective class philosophy and education ; still others bibliog- 
raphy and elocution! 

Such a college association as I have suggested would make 
it impossible for anyone ever again to base radical changes in 
college courses on mistaken facts, such as I have referred to 
in my brief discussion of the length of the college course. 
Such a statistical association would greatly lighten the labors 
of the overworked college president, who now has to collect 
his educational data as he runs, — and perhaps I may be per- 
mitted to add, as my own trade is also that of college presi- 
dent, — that it would also greatly improve the trustworthiness 
of the statistics on which he bases his educational reforms. 



1905] The college 23 

Even the few facts I have presented to you this afternoon 
have been collected at great expenditure of time from many 
journals and educational magazines published during the past 
twenty years. They are nowhere to be found classified and 
arranged. Indeed, if the present chaotic conditions in educa- 
tion are to continue, boards of trustees ought to be required 
by law to provide a trained statistician as the running mate of 
every college or university president before letting him loose 
on our educational systems. 

Intellectual experiments are the most costly of all con- 
ceivable experiments, for they affect the mind stuff of the 
next generation. The decline or advance of the race is the 
issue involved. It is indeed terrible to think that changes 
of vast importance have already been made in the constitution 
of the American college, based on such incorrect assumptions 
and misleading arguments as those which I have attempted to 
disprove. This discussion has at least shown the need of col- 
lecting carefully and studying accurately such educational data 
as exist before we lay rash hands on the College, which, im- 
perfect as it may be, has yet proved itself marvelously adapted 
to our needs in the past. 

M. Carey Thomas 

Bryn Mawr College, 

Bryn Mawr, Pa. 



i 



„™,S R ^ RY 0F CONGRESS^ 



019 743 870 8 



